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DAC 50th Anniversary Awards

On the Wednesday evening of DAC this year was the 50th Anniversary Awards dinner. Unfortunately I was unable to attend since I had booked my flight out that evening long before I heard about the awards dinner.

I’m not going to run through all the awards. There is a page listing them all on the DAC website here. However, over a period of 50 years there are some pretty long-lived achievements.

Firstly, the most persistent attendee award went to Pat Pistilli. He started the first DAC (although it was simply called SHARE, the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort) back then. Of course eventually, over 25 years ago, DAC became much bigger. So Pat founded MP Associates which has run the show (and others) ever since.

Five companies have been coming to DAC for over 25 years, pretty much since there was an exhibition as well as an academic conference. They are Cadence, Mentor, Springer, Synopsys and Tanner.

Four people have published over 50 papers at DAC: Larry Pileggi, David Blaauw, Miodrag Potkonjak and Massoud Pedram. But Alberto (do I need to give a last name) is the most prolific author in the history of DAC. The number of papers is sufficiently daunting it isn’t even on the DAC website.

Perhaps even more surprising is winning multiple Best Paper awards over the years. The standard to publish a paper at DAC is high (I managed it once, woo hoo) but to win best paper is an order of magnitude higher. Nine people have done it three times but only two have done it four times: Kurt Keutzer and Randy Bryant. But only Alberto has done it 5 times (at DAC 19, 20, 28, 43 and 44).

Then, beyond getting the best paper award, which is a sprint, there is the marathon. Who are the most cited authors for their body of work at DAC? The top 10 (in order) are Randy Bryant, Bob Brayton, Srinivas Devadas, Kurt Keutzer, Andrew Khang, David Blaauw, Larry Pileggi, Massoud Pedram, Sharad Malik and, of course, Alberto.

Finally, Pat Pistilli was awarded a special “DAC Foundation Award” since clearly without Pat’s work over the years there would be no DAC.